As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered an emotional mea culpa Wednesday to Congress about the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, a Marine general said the military is also to blame because it lacked the resources to respond and prevent the deaths of four Americans.

U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in Benghazi along with two former Navy SEALs turned contract workers — Tyrone Woods of Imperial Beach and Glen Doherty of Encinitas — and information officer Sean Smith, a San Diego native, after highly trained militants assaulted the consulate with gunfire and mortars.

“It is my contention that in Benghazi, military leaders are at fault to some degree,” said Lt. Gen. John Toolan, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force headquartered at Camp Pendleton.

“Because if you look at the challenge and you look at the time lines and you look at what happened, why didn’t we have forces capable of bringing people into Benghazi, put a security cordon around that consulate and pull those four guys out?”

The answer is complicated and involves changes in both the type of threats America faces and its ability to respond, according to military leaders and security analysts.

Military cutbacks dating to the 1990s led to the loss of a Marine Expeditionary Unit assigned to the Mediterranean, which could have easily landed troops in Benghazi using the MV-22 Osprey, Toolan told the San Diego Military Advisory Council Wednesday morning.

The last 12 years at war heightened competition for military resources, increasing constraints in naval shipbuilding and a push to use special operations teams for “middleweight” missions once handled by the Marine Corps, he added.

The Arab Spring that led to the toppling of dictators in Egypt and Libya and a bloody war in Syria also unleashed militants and weapons. And the decline of al-Qaeda and death of Osama bin Laden failed to stop the terrorist movement, which lives on in autonomous franchises across North Africa and the Middle East.

“You can take a look at what happened in Benghazi and you can say that is the ‘new normal.’ And that’s not promising,” Toolan said. “If you look at what’s happened in Libya and other places along the Maghreb, the Levant, what’s happened in Syria ... problems have grown.”

How America should respond to terrorist threats abroad is an ongoing debate. On one end of the spectrum are those who say the United States cannot afford most military interventions and should focus on partnerships with foreign armies and police forces to hunt terrorists.

The CIA’s drone program targeting suspected terrorists in other countries such as Pakistan and Yemen is also highly controversial, because of international sovereignty, the lack of due process for accused terrorists, civilian casualties and the inability to interrogate and glean intelligence from those who are assassinated.

On the other end, some argue for a more robust boots-on-the-ground response, ranging from special operations raids like the one that killed bin Laden to the seaborne force the Marines provide and talk of Army brigades based in an expanding number of foreign countries.